This is me

Hi,

I’m Debra,

I take photographs of ‘somethingness’!

‘Somethingness’ was a word my friend Sarah coined when I started taking portraits seriously. “You don’t just photograph people, you capture the ‘somethingness’ of them,“ she said, and it kind of stuck with me.

I’m a people-watcher. It’s an introvert trait. We watch from the sidelines and we kind of live in our heads. We may not say a whole lot but we’re taking it all in, and what I take in most is somethingness!

Arnold Newman was a photographer I greatly admire. He once said

We don’t take pictures with cameras – we take them with our hearts and minds. 

I totally get that. I take photos in my head all the time. The way a mother gazes at her child <click>, the indignant expression on a toddler’s face when his sister swipes his sweets <click>, that look you give your partner when they’ve just said something really really stupid <click>. Faces are fantastically fascinating to me. Did you know we even have a specialist area of the brain which is totally dedicated to recognising the human face and its expressions?! It’s official name is the fusiform face area. I call mine my ‘somethingness detector’. You can read more about ‘somethingness’ here.

Erm…what else do you need to know about me?

I’m nice…not scary…not even a little bit. Not even when I’m holding a camera…honest.

And actually I think niceness is an underrated character trait.

I love dark chocolate and cake and peppermint tea. In fact I could probably survive on that diet for quite a long time, with the occasional glass of wine thrown in.

I’m also a qualified optometrist!

Take a look around the site and if you think I can help you contact me and we’ll talk.

If you want to know a bit more about me you can visit my other blog www.seeingasiam.co.uk  It’s all a bit more random, but there are more photos, and visual psychology, confessions and cake. See you there.

Debra